When Context Hurts: The Crossover Effect of Knowledge Transfer on Multi-Agent Design Exploration

ArXi:2605.04361v1 Announce Type: new The prevailing assumption in agent orchestration is that context is better. We test this on multi-agent software design across 10 tasks, 7 context-injection conditions, and over 2,700 runs, and find a crossover effect: the same artifact type improves design exploration on some tasks (up to 20$\times$ tradeoff coverage) and actively degrades it on others (up to 46% reduction). On several tasks, an irrelevant document performs as well as or better than every relevant artifact.